Another visual experiment on tagging:
How do individuals use tags — compared to the community? Do you use private language or are you a mainstream tagger? When you tag with “design” — do the others think it is “art”?

On the left: the personal tags for the personal bookmarks — ordered by frequency — the containing box per is log-scaled so you get an impression of the long–tail position of a tag. Which means: Often used tags are large, bright and go to the top.

On the right: community tags for the tagged ressources.

In the middle: tags with the same name are connected. If a line is horizontal, the indvidual and the community essentially agree on the relevance of the tag for the ressources. The steeper it is — the larger the disagreement. If no line starts at a tag, it means it is not present in the other list

So in the picture above, you can see my tags. Same facts you can read from the picture:
• “m.a.thesis” is a very often used, but private tag of mine.
• The ressources I tag in general are mostly tagged with “design” by the community. I, however, use the tag “design” much less often.
• “news”, “semantic web”, “webdev” are tags I use often, but not the community.
etc.

And often course, you can click individual tags to see what the comparison is like for subsets of the bookmarks. That’s especially interesting for obscure tags like “guru” — you can see what the tagger “means” by looking at the distribution of the community bookmarks (in this case “design – art – programmer – artist”). Interesting!

Some more shots:

I wish I could say “click here for the interactive version” as usual — but unfortunately, del.icio.us offers a JSON API, but did not put a crossdomain.xml file on their server. Which means the visualization (which runs nicely on my harddisc) cannot load data when put in the web. Bummer. I hope I can figure something out.

So for now — I can only offer a download link. Click the index.html. You might have to adjust you Flash player security settings in order to load the community tags. Caveat: The application is still a bit buggy and pretty heavy concerning processor ressources.

Related posts

19 Responses to 'You say… We say…'

interesting – as usual. unfortunately the downloaded application doesn’t work. anytime i want to change the settings of flash-player it starts getting weird. the settings dialogue is blinking and i can’t change anything.
anyway, some awful new thoughts by you. and i am still thinking about acoustics methods of this whole thing.

[…] You say… We say… Another visual experiment on tagging: How do individuals use tags compared to the community? Do you use private language or are you a mainstream tagger? When you tag with “design” do the others think it is “art”? (tags: tag name visualization) […]

a simple proxy might help. simply have a local php script (or any other language) that acts as a proxy between your flash app and the site. the flash app asks the local php script for an xml file which is then contructed through the json api which the php script can access.

Hi, thanks Tijs, thought of this as well. The problem here is that all visitors have to go through the same proxy, which together with the one-request-per-second policy of delicious will be quite a bottleneck. Anyways, I guess that’s the solution I should go for, if nothing changes!

[…] Well-formed data » You say… We say… How do individuals use tags — compared to the community? Do you use private language or are you a mainstream tagger? When you tag with “design” — do the others think it is “art”? (tags: tagging visualization flash research facets comparison tag folksonomy cool folksonomies group ideas inspiration) […]

[…] You Say We Say This project is a visual experiment in tagging. On the left you get the personal tags for the personal bookmarks ordered by frequency, and the containing box per is log-scaled so you get an impression of the long-tail position of a tag. Which means that often used tags are large, bright and go to the top. On the right are the community tags for the tagged resources. In the middle the tags with the same name are connected. If a line is horizontal, the indvidual and the community essentially agree on the relevance of the tag for the ressources. The steeper it is the larger the disagreement. If no line starts at a tag, it means it is not present in the other list. Very fascinating construct for tagging. […]

[…] You Say We Say This project is a visual experiment in tagging. On the left you get the personal tags for the personal bookmarks ordered by frequency, and the containing box per is log-scaled so you get an impression of the long-tail position of a tag. Which means that often used tags are large, bright and go to the top. On the right are the community tags for the tagged resources. In the middle the tags with the same name are connected. If a line is horizontal, the indvidual and the community essentially agree on the relevance of the tag for the ressources. The steeper it is the larger the disagreement. If no line starts at a tag, it means it is not present in the other list. Very fascinating construct for tagging. […]

Fixed a bug where a kill from troop trap gave the wrong
message. Battlefield Heroes is founded on a
great idea: Let the customer pay real money to create an individual avatar.
“See Wang Yu Yan hole to the foot of his confront, embarrassed and then hesitated, and prayed and claimed: “Prince so courteous, well Jen is inclined to influence pleasures of the staff.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

About

My name is Moritz Stefaner. I am interested in information aesthetics, interactive visualization, and how the web transforms our understanding of information.